An Australian geologist’s role in NASA’s Curiosity mission

Image courtesy JPL/NASA

Early on the morning of August 6 2012, a group of scientists held their breath as Curiosity, NASA’s latest Mars rover, streaked through the thin Martian atmosphere in ball of fire. One of those scientists was Dr Penny King a geologist currently working at the Australian National University.

“It’s the opportunity of a lifetime to be involved in a mission that explores new areas in our solar system,” Dr King says, “And based on past missions, we expect to find out that the Martian surface is more diverse and interesting than we could ever have imagined.”

Although the possibility of life on Mars is a strong driver for exploration of the red planet, Curiosity’s primary mission isn’t to look for that life directly. Instead, it will assess how suitable the environment of Mars is for supporting life either in the present or at some point in the distant past.

Dr King is part of a small team of scientists that will be working with one of the instruments on curiosity, the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS), which is sponsored by the Canadian Space Agency. The APSX’s job is to identify elements present in rocks enabling geologists to identify those rocks and build that information into a detailed picture of the geological history of Mars.

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